


swallow the light

by sapphicish



Series: PRIDEfall [2]
Category: Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02, Season/Series 02, alien tina is the PROMINENT star of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 21:58:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17475719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphicish/pseuds/sapphicish
Summary: Humans are dim in every sense of the word, but Tina feels brighter than the others, or maybe it's just their newfound connection that makes her feel that way. It feels like she's sharing the body, not just taking it over entirely, and though she knows both Mother and Father would frown upon it, she doesn't really mind the idea.





	swallow the light

**Author's Note:**

> this kind of is a sequel to "ashes on the ground" but that one doesn't have to be read before this one necessarily just know that tina and leslie...are in love!
> 
> i'm glad so many of you seem to like the whole TINA MINORU SLEEPS WITH THE OTHER MOMS thing i'm blindly flinging out here because it's true and i should say it, so thanks for reading!
> 
> alien!tina strikes me as someone who is a tad less bloodthirsty than her brethren but in a very particular "ooh humans are fascinating, ooh i like this body, ooh i like the way this makes me feel, ooh i have my own interests in all of this and it doesn't really line up with the others' own ambitions" sort of way, but she also strikes me as INCREDIBLY impulsive and kind of just a fun-loving murder lady so i wanted to write about that! she's really fascinating and i hope we learn more about her if we get a season 3 because uhhhh pure magical light alien lady Hot?
> 
> (alien lady in stacey's body is ALSO very hot, just so we're all clear on this)

This vessel reacts at the mere mention of Leslie Dean.

She finds it just mildly interesting, at first. She sees that lovely, freckled profile on the wall of the PRIDE offices in Forbes, all of them lined up in a neat row including her own new body, but none stand out to her like the head of the Church of Gibborim, blonde and pale, emanating a light of her own. It goes without saying that it's lesser than theirs, different, _human,_ but it's a light all the same—and when she sees that face, she's overcome with an eerie sensation, a flash of _I know her, I knew her once, I will know her again._

She doesn't talk to Mother or Father about it, because they wouldn't understand. Wouldn't possibly understand this pull she feels, this rush of energy in her vessel's veins, trickling down her spine whenever she catches a glimpse of those terribly, wonderfully familiar features – she only really has Tina's memories to go by, but she feels like she knows Leslie in much the same way Tina does, and Tina knows her _very_ well.

In the moments between, when there is less a struggle for control and more the quiet sense that her body is finally adjusting, giving up, surrendering once and for all, she looks at photos of Leslie, videos, thinks of her face in her mind, and luxuriates in that unfamiliar rush.

It burns hot like fire in her stomach. Anger she can identify. Heavy, blunt anger, pointed like a weapon. Hatred? Maybe. Maybe this is hatred, and she's so thrilled to know it.

She doesn't understand the other parts, admittedly. The quiet trill in her skull that says _sorrow,_ the weak tremble in the fingertips that aren't her own but are her own that read _longing._ But she'll learn about those things too.

She'll learn about everything.

  
  


  
  


Humans are weak, they have limits; she eats six slices of chocolate cake in one sitting and learns that the hard way, but it was just so good, felt so _right_ in her mouth, the cool steel of the fork clicking off her vessel's teeth because she was still learning, and sometimes she'd swallow hard enough that it hurt her throat and she'd choke a little. It's easy to miss the signs, the swelling and uncomfortable feeling in her stomach, the burning of her throat, the frantic flutter in her chest. Humans simply have a reaction for everything.

And everyone.

Before he was choking around a shard of glass in his throat, she'd look at Robert, and there is this quiet normal sort of _thing_ inside of her, like her vessel has become so used to the way she feels around her husband that most of it has been reduced to nothing at all, and she thinks that's sad. Disappointing, really. She tried to have sex with him, but just a few times, because it was always him rejecting her or her vessel rejecting the idea of having sex with him or it would be something wrong with her. She'd lean in to kiss him or give him that seductive look men liked so much, only to find that she just didn't want to.

She hadn't taken it as a failure. She takes very few things as failures. She knows where Tina Minoru's true interest lies—regardless of anything else, like how desperately she tries to cover it up—and it isn't with Robert. Or maybe it is, maybe it's both of them, but these creatures are complicated, their feelings moreso, they have so _much_ of them and so little space to contain them in that it all seems mixed up, too full, like she might burst. She can rarely tell where the hatred ends and the love begins.

For Robert, and for Leslie too.

It isn't that she's very different from Tina, really. They both have feelings. Emotions. Curiosities, lust, attraction, hope. Tina has more sadness than she's ever experienced, more desperation, more anger. She's never seen the point to any of those things, but for humans it's like there is no point. They just feel, and feel, and feel.

Tina feels. A lot. And she struggles a lot, and she just doesn't understand why this vessel won't _give in_ already. Mother and Father have both had their fair share of trouble with theirs, but they're mostly in control at this point—she, however, has to keep fighting.

It's a little annoying.

  
  


  
  


She lies awake sometimes, feeling the constant push-and-pull of this body, aching and dull around the edges.

She feels. Feels: the sheets, soft and silk. Tina's hair, soft and silk. The headboard above her, hard smooth wood. The human's skin. A little dry. She worries too often that it might be deteriorating, the way the Magistrate's is, but then she remembers moisturizer, lotion, and Tina's flesh isn't growing hard and weak at once, failing and falling and flaking.

She remembers this, and the organ in her chest stops pounding.

Just the same it clenches when she looks across the room. There is a picture there, on a dresser, one of many that Tina hasn't had the courage to press flat down so that their faces no longer stare out at her. Nico, and Amy, and Robert, and Tina.

They are beautiful. They are grinning. They are happy.

This feeling aches. It is not the first time she's felt it, not the tenth, not the hundredth since entering this body and she wonders if Tina feels it too, somewhere deep inside.

She tries turning it down once, the photo, but she closes her fingers around it, and they grip tight, and then she is shaking; fingertip to wrist to shoulder, tremors like her bones are breaking apart, clenching, seizing.

 _No,_ she thinks, or Tina thinks—blindly, desperately, full of a frothing, dizzy rage and fear.

She lets go, startled, and the trembling stops. 

Just like that.

“Okay,” she says to the empty space around her, “okay.”

The struggle ceases, and the human mind curls, coils up like a snake, and goes back to sleep.

 _Oh,_ she thinks, and is only a little ashamed that it's more delight and wonder than it is trepidation or anger.

  
  


  
  


Mostly, it's exciting. 

Humans are dim in every sense of the word, but Tina feels brighter than the others, or maybe it's just their newfound connection that makes her feel that way. It feels like she's sharing the body, not just taking it over entirely, and though she knows both Mother and Father would frown upon it, she doesn't really mind the idea.

Tina, on the other hand, definitely minds. She doesn't fight, doesn't scream and scratch and bite because she doesn't know how to, doesn't understand what's happening to her and has no memory of it whenever she's awake, but almost as much as the mind—the emotions, the thoughts, the memories—it's the body that fights her: a hand that freezes mid-movement like she's forgotten how to work the muscles, a brain that falters when she's trying to work out a problem she'd be able to get through at any other time. She thinks of Brother and then she finds her thoughts straying to Robert—how perfectly their hands used to fit together, sugar sweet and heavy on their tongues as they leaned their heads over papers, blueprints, a laugh warm in her ear, dates and romance and everything turning cold and bitter, dry and sour ash on her tongue – forever gone. 

Or to Nico, a chasm between them torn open by her own flaws, and she thinks just that, _her own,_ like she is Tina and Tina is her and they have had the same life, the same experiences, are the same person with the same love and greed and hate for things, like she is the one that stores precious things in a false bottom of a drawer and tucks her dead child's diary away in another and she is the one that can't sleep unless she has someone beside her or, in place of that, the staff and a track of white noise to soothe her to a resting state and she is the one that hurts, hurts, hurts.

Sometimes, but not so often because this vessel rejects it harder in a way she doesn't always with the others, she thinks of Leslie. After Robert's betrayal came another, Tina's own, and it had felt good. So good, because it belonged to her, and she was the one taking things that she deserved for herself now, and Robert was left half-forgotten in the dirt where he belonged. Leslie had taken this body and made it feel something new, something better, something like healing.

Tina was owed this, Leslie told her, and Tina had agreed.

Both of them refused to think about how they thought of it as so much more.

Humans were silly like that.

  
  


  
  


“Hello,” she says to a mirror, a wall, the floor, the ceiling above her vessel's bed. _Hello. Hello. Hello._ She says it in the dark, in the light, while showering and learning how to paint her nails in that fine, careful way humans always manage to do, the same deep red that Tina likes because it feels and looks wrong otherwise.

One night, she says, “Hello.”

And she thinks, _hello._

And then she realizes the thought is not hers, the response is not hers, the hello is not hers.

She uses Tina's smile and her – _her_ – skin crawls and maybe, then, the smile doesn't work out very well. She stops smiling. “Hello,” she whispers.

 _Hello,_ parroted back, odd and stilted, then – _get out._

She lays down and closes her eyes and says, “No. But don't worry. I have a plan.”

  
  


  
  


(Leslie's sudden disappearance makes her vessel bitter, long before she's in better control of it. Words like _coward,_ feelings like deep, dark spite roiling in her stomach, thoughts like _she-couldn't-even-stay-and-face-what-she-did-she-had-to-run-because-that's-all-people-like-her-do._ And then: _what if she didn't run._ And then: _of course she ran._ And then – _but what if._

A most fleeting memory, in the space between and before she'd reunited with Mother and Father, Tina awake for once, unaware of what's inside of her: fingers tapping in an all-too-familiar number on a cellphone, tight around the edges as she waits, waits, waits. Leaves a message, because no one answers.

_Leslie – Leslie. Leslie. If you get this, you call me immediately. Or else._

No answer.

She calls again.

No answer.

Again. Nothing. Again. Again. Again.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

The phone is thrown at the wall, and it shatters, and she gets a new one and decides to forget all about Leslie. 

It's a lot easier said than done.)

  
  


  
  


Tina is wondrous. Lovely. The way humans are, the way that Mother and Father and even Brother wouldn't ever understand because they're not her, but at the same time she's worn, tired, lost; just slightly, a blurring at the corners of her vision, an ache in her head, an illusion she can reach out and shatter. There is a deep, lonely echo in her mind; a deep, lonely knowledge. When at last they eat the subjects in the pods, she'll recover, but how long will it last? How long will all of this last? She wants it to last forever.

She's always been curiouser than the others, lighter around the edges, flitting from this to that – fleeting and fickle, Brother called her, but fondly. She won't let it be ruined, this radiant life. She can't. And it hasn't started yet, the flaking of the skin, the rotting of the body, death and decay. But it will. Eventually.

She doesn't like it, doesn't like what stress does to Tina, doesn't like what her light does to this beautiful body, to this thing that belongs to her now.

As always, she knows exactly what she has to do.

  
  


  
  


“Hello,” she says, late in the evening when the three stumble out of their tanks, dazed and confused. At the sight of Janet her body burns with quiet, low resentment, set to simmer, and it makes her smile.

“What—“ the boy starts, roughly, pressing a hand to his head. “What happened?”

“No time for explanations or introductions,” she says cheerily, turning on a heel. “You're all coming with me. Or...I suppose _I'm_ coming with _you._ ”

“Tina? Wh—“ Karolina stumbles up next to her, and she doesn't look at her directly because then she'll see all of that beautiful, glorious light, and she'll think of Mother and Father and how disappointed they would be in her, how angry, and then she'll end up putting them back in the machines and going back to sleep. And she can't do that.

Almost worse than Mother and Father's wrath is this: Tina would be so, so angry.

“Why are you doing this?” Janet hisses as they come out of the lab, closer and closer to their freedom.

She gives Janet an odd, long look over a shoulder as they pause before the door, just so she can make sure the way is clear. “Because,” she says, “Tina wanted me to. Well, she did say I could leave you, but—I have no problem with you personally, and I'm the one in control. So.”

“I don't understand,” Karolina says, her voice trembling. “Is—are the others all right? How long has it been? Where—why—what's happening? Who are you?”

“I'm your sister,” she says, and then she pushes them—with their staggering legs and dumbfounded faces—out into the yard, follows them out, leads them into Tina's car. “I'll be with you shortly. Do not move, or I'll be very upset.”

She doesn't wait for a response; she goes back inside, to the gentle ticks and beeps and chimes of the machines, the computers, the empty glass tubes that lay waiting for the return of fresh bodies.

She watches the glow spread from her fingertips up to her wrists, and for a moment she hears and feels and sees Tina like they're standing right next to eachother. 

_Do it._

She feels herself smile though she's not sure why – maybe it's the excitement. She's never rebelled before.

She raises her hands, and destroys it all.

**Author's Note:**

> anyways...sister parallels of karolina wanting to rebel vs alien!tina wanting to rebel, anyone???


End file.
